Areni-1: The World’s Oldest Winery

In 2007, in a cool limestone cave in the mountains of southern Armenia, archaeologists found the oldest winery on earth. Not a jar with wine residue, not a lucky sherd, but an entire working installation — a basin for treading grapes, a vat to catch the juice, cups to drink it from, and the dried remains of the grapes themselves — all sealed under the cave floor for roughly six thousand years.¹ The site, called Areni-1, pushed the origins of organised winemaking back to about 4100 BC and handed a small Armenian village an outsized place in the history of wine.

What makes the story stranger is everything else the same cave preserved, and the mountain that looms over the whole region. This is a landscape where the oldest shoe in the world, the world’s first winery, and the biblical resting place of Noah’s ark all sit within a short drive of one another. Areni is not just an archaeological footnote; it is one of the places where the deep past of wine feels almost close enough to touch.

A winery in a cave

The discovery began in 2007, when a team co-directed by the archaeologists Gregory Areshian and Boris Gasparyan started digging in a cave complex near the village of Areni.² What they uncovered over the next three years read like a winemaking kit frozen in time: a shallow clay basin about a metre long, angled so that juice from grapes trodden by foot would drain into a deeper vat sunk beside it, surrounded by storage jars, a drinking cup, and the desiccated pressings — skins, seeds, and even shrivelled vines — of Vitis vinifera.¹ It is the oldest complete winemaking facility known anywhere, roughly a thousand years older than the next-oldest example.

Chemical analysis, later published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, confirmed what the layout implied: these people were pressing grapes and fermenting the juice on purpose, at scale, in the Late Chalcolithic — the Copper Age, before the wheel was common and long before writing reached the region.³ The Areni villagers were not stumbling on fermentation by accident. They had a process.

The cave of firsts

The winery was not even the cave’s most famous resident. In a separate chamber, archaeologists found a single well-worn leather shoe, stuffed with grass, that radiocarbon dating placed at around 3500 BC — making it the oldest intact leather shoe in the world, older than Stonehenge and the Egyptian pyramids.⁴ It had been preserved, like the winery, by the cave’s cool, dry, stable air and a sealing layer of sheep dung, a natural time capsule.

The same conditions preserved other startling things: dried apricots and grapes, woven grass, and, in one skull, fragments of a 6,000-year-old human brain, among the oldest soft tissue of its kind ever recovered.² A cave that could keep a brain and a shoe intact for millennia was always going to keep the evidence of wine, and that is exactly what makes Areni-1 so valuable — it did not just hold a jar, it held the whole scene.

Wine for the dead

Why make wine in a cave at all, rather than out in the open near the vines? The answer archaeologists lean toward is unsettling and revealing: ritual. The Areni-1 winery sat among some twenty human burials, and the excavators suspect the wine was made in part for funerary ceremonies — poured for the dead, or drunk by the living in their honour.¹ Cups and a drinking bowl were found beside the graves.

If they are right, then wine was bound up with ceremony from its very first industrial moment. It was never merely a drink to wash down a meal; it was a substance with meaning, worth the labour of pressing and fermenting and worth offering to the dead.⁸ That link between wine and the sacred — libations to gods, blood-of-the-vine symbolism, communion cups — runs through nearly every culture that followed, and at Areni you can see it at the source.

In the shadow of Ararat

No account of Armenian wine can ignore the mountain on the horizon. Mount Ararat, the twin-peaked volcano that dominates the skyline south of Yerevan, is where the book of Genesis says Noah’s ark came to rest after the flood — and the very next thing the text records Noah doing is planting a vineyard and making wine.⁵ Armenians have long taken the story personally: Ararat is their national symbol, stamped on the country’s coat of arms, even though the border drawn in the twentieth century left the peak itself just inside Turkey.

It is one of those coincidences that stops you short. The oldest myth of wine’s rebirth and the oldest hard evidence of a winery point to the same highlands, within sight of the same mountain. Whatever one makes of the flood story, it preserves a folk memory of something real: that this corner of the world, the Armenian highlands and the South Caucasus, is where wine began. Myth and archaeology, for once, agree on the address.

Areni noir and the modern revival

The remarkable thing about Areni is that the wine never left. The village still grows Areni noir, a hardy indigenous red planted on its own ungrafted roots in stony volcanic soil — vines that shrugged off the phylloxera louse that devastated Europe, because the pest struggles in this ground.⁶ Each autumn Areni hosts a wine festival where villagers ladle out homemade vintages, a folk tradition running in unbroken parallel to the 6,000-year-old cellar up the road.

After independence, a new generation of producers set out to make Areni noir into a serious modern wine, building high-altitude estates in Vayots Dzor and returning ancient clay-vessel methods to the cellar. Armenian wine, long overshadowed, began winning attention on international lists for the first time in living memory. The country that made the world’s oldest wine had spent centuries known for something else entirely — and that is the last twist in the story.

The brandy that overshadowed the wine

For most of the twentieth century, Armenia was famous not for wine but for brandy. Under Soviet planning the region was steered toward distilling, and Armenian “cognac” became a prestige product across the USSR and beyond. Its legend attached itself to one man in particular: Winston Churchill.⁷ The story, told endlessly, holds that Stalin served Churchill Armenian Dvin brandy at the 1945 Yalta Conference, that the prime minister was smitten, and that Stalin thereafter shipped him hundreds of bottles a year — even, in one telling, exiling the master blender to Siberia when Churchill complained the quality had slipped, then reinstating him when it recovered.

It is a wonderful story, and it should be treated with caution: researchers have found no actual record of any such shipments, and the details shift with every retelling.⁷ What is not in doubt is that brandy, not wine, carried Armenia’s drinking reputation through the Soviet century — which is exactly why the return to Areni noir matters. The revival is not an invention; it is a homecoming, a country reclaiming the wine it made before anyone else on earth. (For the deeper backstory, see our guide to the origins of wine.)

This day in wine history

Milestones from the world’s oldest winery.

• c. 4100 BC
  The world’s oldest winery

  At Areni-1, villagers press and ferment grapes with a basin, vat, and cups — the oldest known winemaking facility on earth.

• c. 3500 BC
  The oldest shoe

  A grass-stuffed leather shoe is left in the same cave, later found intact — the oldest preserved footwear in the world.

• 1945
  Brandy at Yalta

  By legend, Stalin serves Churchill Armenian Dvin brandy at the Yalta Conference, cementing the country’s reputation for spirits over wine.

• 2007
  Areni-1 rediscovered

  Archaeologists Areshian and Gasparyan begin excavating the cave and uncover the ancient winery.

• 2011
  The winery is confirmed

  Chemical analysis in the Journal of Archaeological Science verifies deliberate winemaking at Areni around 4100 BC.

Frequently asked questions

Read more

• The origins of wine, where winemaking began
• Georgia: the cradle of wine, Armenia’s northern neighbour and rival for the title
• Wine in ancient Israel, from Canaan to the Byzantines
• Hajji Firuz Tepe, the Iranian jar that once held the wine record

References

1. H. Barnard et al., “Chemical evidence for wine production around 4000 BCE in the Late Chalcolithic Near Eastern highlands,” Journal of Archaeological Science 38 (2011). ↩
2. A. Curry, “Earliest Known Winery Found in Armenian Cave,” National Geographic (2011). nationalgeographic.com. ↩
3. “World’s Oldest-Known Winery Discovered,” Wine Spectator (2011). winespectator.com. ↩
4. R. Pinhasi et al., “First Direct Evidence of Chalcolithic Footwear from the Near Eastern Highlands,” PLoS ONE 5 (2010). ↩
5. Genesis 8:4 and 9:20 (the ark on Ararat; Noah plants a vineyard). ↩
6. “The Enduring Spirit of Armenia,” Wine-Searcher (2025). wine-searcher.com. ↩
7. “Armenian Brandy: The Fuel of Diplomacy,” War on the Rocks; and R. Langworth on the Churchill legend (which no shipping records support). ↩
8. Patrick E. McGovern, Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture (Princeton University Press). ↩

Ancient Wine: The Search for the Origins of Viniculture
Patrick E. McGovern (Princeton University Press)
The definitive account of wine’s prehistoric roots, from the scientist who helped analyse Areni.

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